David Anderson : Enterprise Service Planning – Scaling the Benefits of Kanban

Enterprise Services Planning (ESP) is the new future of management for professional services businesses. Your business is an ecosystem of complex interdependent services. The new strategy for surviving in the fast moving, rapidly changing 21st Century is to create a business that this continually « fit for purpose » by installing an organizational capability for evolutionary change and adaptation. ESP enables this new strategy by helping you evolve your network of services and make them fit for purpose one at a time. ESP practices help you with Portfolio Management concerns: schedule and sequence work; forecast delivery dates and expected outcomes; allocate capacity; manage dependencies; understand and manage risk; ensure sufficient liquidity to react to unfolding events.

For large enterprises, the ability to deliver early and often is necessary, but not sufficient. Without clear and transparent alignment to a strategy, the organisation might still end up being very busy, getting better at delivering more and more of the wrong thing, but not achieving any positive results. However, knowing what the right strategy should be can also be a challenge in today’s complex world. Strategy Deployment is the Lean approach to meeting this challenge. Organisations need to become laboratories, in which they are constantly running experiments, generating learning, and applying that learning to continually progress towards their True North.

How far can you go with it?Improvement without change is impossible. Yet, most people think about change as big, slow and scary.But what if you could make it infinitely small and learn to evolve fast, almost as fast as some of the most adaptive microorganisms on earth?With principles such as “If change is hard, make it continuous.”, Claudio began a journey that led him to the creation of PopcornFlow, a simple but sophisticated method to introduce fast change and make better decisions through deliberate, ultra-rapid experimentation.PopcornFlow is already impacting lives inside and outside the business world, including entrepreneurs, executives, policy makers, change instigators, achievers, schools, families, special-need kids, and more.Don’t get too comfortable with your own cozy routines and mental cages. For a new revolution is now on your doorstep.

Disconnection between portfolio management and work organization on a team level

These are typical issues with portfolio management. However, before jumping into solutions we should ask why the issues are so common. The limited visibility of the current situation is one of the root causes. Lack of information about the impact of new commitments on the organization is another. The decision-making process that results in starting too many new endeavors is on the list too. The session would focus on addressing these root causes and not the symptoms.

Instead of a common strategy of formalizing the processes around portfolio management we can use Portfolio Kanban to evolve our way of working with the portfolio. The approach bases on “start with what you have” principle. This means that it doesn’t provoke resistance. Also small, evolutionary changes are preferred over big-bang changes. On the top of that, using the method doesn’t require extensive effort, which increases the odds of sustaining its adoption in the long run.

I will show how this low-friction approach challenges our thinking of project attractiveness, improves our awareness of value, cost of delay, impact on other commitments and risks that aren’t directly related to the project. These should be the key factors to drive our decisions on starting new endeavors.

This is a crucial change that has to happen to enable the evolution of portfolio management. And Portfolio Kanban is a way to catalyze that change.

The session will cover the theory behind Portfolio Kanban as well as the basics of the method. It will be supported with a series of short exercises that present the typical challenges which we deal with on a portfolio level.

Conway’s law states that every system is as great as the organisation that created it. We want our systems to have quality on all levels. We want them to be functional, performant, usable and useful. And we want them to be successful. How do we create organisations which reliably create awesome software, delighting customers?

Olaf offers an integral view at software and systems quality. Learn how the level of consciousness your organisation operates from determines your effectiveness and quality. Take away how to start shifting that level next Monday.

Mattias Skarin : Kanban.. and are we done? Lessons learned across kanban case studies.. and what happened next